Slack Defense Strategy

[edit] Disclaimer

This is not intended to be the defense that will always save your empire; there is no such thing. There is always a skill aspect, and an experienced attacker could have counter-measures for these tactics ready (especially if he knows what your intended defense is!). Instead, look to this for ideas on how you can improve your own defense and add in your own ideas. This can also be used as an example of what a defense plan really is. A good defense plan is much more than having units in place and pre-placing them.

Contents 1 Disclaimer 2 Overview 3 Brief Theory of the 'Slack Defense' 4 Basic Defensive Setup 5 Features I Like (and heavily recommend) 6 Advanced Infantry Tactics 7 Other Things of Importance 8 Example Empire

[edit] Overview

I know that a popular defense touted by players for new empires to use is the sparsely built strategy. I also know that there are people still having problems with being attacked in the noob faction. I keep a level 2 in the noob faction mostly to answer the occasional question, however recently I have fought 3 defensive land wars (successfully), and tried to do so without using units that are too horribly overpowered (meaning stuff that you might expect a new player to have). This is basically a document about what I have learned in those wars that I think will benefit new players. The thing that made me decide to make this is that new players cannot be expected to take advantage of the game’s quirks in ways that are obvious to long time players. Hopefully this will help.

[edit] Brief Theory of the 'Slack Defense'

Slack Defense is the term I have given the current tactic of building many small cities that I have seen springing up. It works very well when done properly, but if poorly executed is no more effective than anything else. The basic goal of using the Slack Defense in a small empire is that if you build too concentrated than it is easy for an attacker to trigger 2 or 3 cease fires at once, thereby bypassing a huge portion of your war protections. As a result, a sparsely built empire is less likely to have this happen because the attacker can only take stuff in small nibbles, thus triggering CF’s one at a time.

An overall goal of this is that once you are CFed the attacker has to stop hitting you, giving you a chance to get online, organize a counter strike, and hit at a time that is favorable to you which has the potential of taking the initiative from your enemy. I have come up with a few tweaks to the system, and while I doubt any are particularly new they are things I think most new players fail to take advantage of.

Slack Defense Pro: You are hard to knock out in a single swipe. In addition, if you are a factioned empire, it is more difficult for an enemy faction to surrender you quickly. This helps your faction as a whole because one popular way to win Fwars is to quickly kill off low level empires. If you are hard to kill than you can go a long way to helping your faction win the war. The final major benefit is that if done properly, it makes it possible for an active player to turn the tables on an attacker, giving a good chance of winning the war.

Slack Defense Con: The Slack Defense relies heavily on an active player. By active I mean you should be able to be on for at least 2 hours after your set CF expiration time. In addition, you should also be able to play at not normal times or arrange for someone to do so for you (hitting the enemy as soon as his CF ends). If you cannot do this, than the Slack Defense will be much less effective for you. The final potential drawback is that since you will be actively fighting against another player, it is possible that you may simply be out classed in an engagement, trapping your force and setting you back hugely.

[edit] Basic Defensive Setup

Setting up your empire for the slack defense is not very hard. For the most part you just need to have a fair amount of land and small cities (nothing bigger than 500 population). I also personally recommend hiding your main military force if possible (more on this later). Here are a list of things you can do to greatly improve the effectiveness of the defense.

Level 1 Defender: This is very useful if you don’t mind the increase in building costs (+25%). Any battles that happen in cities you own will gain an IDF-5 shot targeting a random spotted enemy unit with a 10 to hit. In longer engagements this is quite decisive. If you intend to defend cities there is no reason not to use this. Set up 4 or 5 stealth towers in the cities to be defended along with your defenders. The stealth towers will act as spotters for the city artillery. Not necessary, but useful.

Build in 2 or more Areas: This is not something that has to be done, but often times having parts of your empire in separate locations makes it much easier to survive the initial attack. If you are in a faction, a single zone surrounded by a friendly empire is a good place to hide units during war even if it has no buildings. If you go further and make sure you cannot be surrendered by losing all the cities in a single area it also vastly increases the attack costs someone will need to pay in order to surrender you, making it less likely you will be attacked in the first place.

Surrender Rate 40% or 50%: While it could be argued that 30% rate is ok because it will trigger the first CF earlier and further decrease the amount you lose in the opening phases of the attack I feel it is too much of a risk. It also gives the attacker a much easier time triggering the other CF’s and if you get unlucky in battle the loss of a single unit may be enough to trigger an additional CF or even Surrender because your threshold is so low when small. Added to this is the fact that when you are surrendered you will pay a fairly large surrender fee, delaying recovery. If you want to CF faster, use 40% surrender rate. If you do not want to pay surrender fees then use 50%. I personally prefer 50% because small empires are easy to start over anyway once you have the hang of the game.

Military Forces: You can use whatever you feel most comfortable with. Personally I have come to prefer a good noob 'Mech (Firefly, Firestarter, and if you are rich a Phawk are my personal favorites) backed up by SCP’s, GRD’s or STR-00’s, and maybe a few of VNG-A3’s. These forces should also be relatively competent. I would recommend a minimum skill of 4. Lower is usually better, so long as you don’t have to worry about keeping your current level.

Reserve Funds: It is ABSOUTELY NECESSARY for you to keep some reserve money. At level 2 I would say 20M at the very minimum (yes, that is 10 days worth of income). More is better. Money gives you flexibility, allowing you to buy DZ’s and additional zones, buy replacement forces, and keep a huge portion of your military mobilized without having to worry about hitting a negative income.

[edit] Features I Like (and heavily recommend)

City Defense: I like to leave my cities either undefended or defended only by 5 stealth towers and possibly some inf (if it is vital). The rest of my army is kept safe, generally away from my infrastructure and also kept diluted across several zones (this is a calculated risk and not strictly necessary). Basic idea is that most people attacking noob empires currently run for cities hoping for that quick knock out, either by capturing a crippling amount of infra early on or by finding and destroying enough military to cripple your ability to fight back. By not defending cities you frustrate this, and even if they do find a splinter of your army it won’t be a significant enough portion to ‘knock you out’. If you chose to do this, keep your forces moving to be on the safe side.

Infantry Reserves: In low level empires I LOVE having spare AR-F weapons on hand. They are cheap (normally costs only between 2-3M to buy a company worth of them) and are wonderfully useful. They can be used as delaying forces with almost no risk (a skill 8 AR-F is only 3 BV), make decent screening forces with a fun intimidation factor (I have a 12 zone front with every zone defended… where is my military for real?), and are simply vicious if used in groups of 12 or more on ABR. Infantry are just so useful I will dedicate a whole section to the proper use of them later. Just keep in mind not to commission them until absolutely needed.

Level 1 Merc: If you already have level 1 defender there is pretty much no reason to not take this. You already have the disadvantage so it won’t get any worse, and on top of that you get 10M remote DZ’s. This is very helpful for attacking a remote enemy or re-launching an attack on an area where you have been evicted. As a side benefit, it makes it less expensive for you to spread into new areas.

Use Mostly Smaller Stuff: This I recommend because it goes together well with the whole strategy of the defense. I would almost say it is vital if you are not defending cities, since it allows you to splinter your military into smaller fragments while keeping several units together. This cannot be done if your military force is just a few powerful units. By smaller stuff I mean things like SCP’s and GRD’s, not jeeps or AIV (they are trash for the most part). While a few big units are easier to control in a battle than many smaller ones, hopefully by the time you hit a significant military force your advantage is so overwhelming that the command and control system recently implemented in battle will be enough to overcome the difficulty of controlling more than 4 units.

[edit] Advanced Infantry Tactics

The proper use of infantry in a low-level empire is vital, and can be decisive if you intend to use the Slack Defense. The trick is knowing the strengths and weaknesses of infantry and knowing how to use them properly. It is also a matter of knowing when an infantry attack will produce a decisive result for your intended goal.

First lets talk about strengths and weaknesses of infantry. Their strengths lie in that they make an ideal delaying force. Throw a company of infantry against enemy units you wish to delay and you will slow them significantly. Since infantry do not cost much they are an ideal choice for this. In addition any type of infantry is simply deadly if sent into ABR en-mass (which discourages enemies from simply ABRing them). A company of infantry allowed to go to ABR will tend to heavily damage any force they are against. A battalion of infantry on ABR will probably destroy almost any level 2 army if it is allowed to go to ABR.

While those factors are very good for infantry, they also have severe weaknesses. First is that almost any force which is actively piloted against infantry will tend to win (although this can be a good way to deplete enemy ammunition). This means that against an active opponent the best you can hope for is a delaying action or foddering the infantry to expend munitions before a real attack. In addition, all infantry are slow. The fastest infantry (motor and jump) have speeds comparable to assault 'Mechs. Foot infantry are agonizingly slow. If an opponent is advancing quickly, it may be impossible to get infantry units into place to delay the attack in time. Furthermore, infantry are expensive to keep commissioned and very expensive to mobilize considering their weapon potential.

Personally I prefer AR-F as my infantry unit of choice. This is because you can get them in large numbers on the cheap, and large numbers of infantry is the primary factor you need. While they are slow this can be overcome with some planning. If you are worried about mobility AR-M may be the way to go. You can use FT-F/M or MG-F/M if you don’t mind spending more. I would advise against using jump inf at all (costs too much).

These infantry weapons will be kept uncommissioned until you are attacked. Since the infantry are mostly fodder and ABR units, skill doesn’t matter so much. There are two ways you can keep your uncommissioned infantry, and a mix of both is probably best. These two ways are what I call stockpiles and garrison dumps.

Stockpiles are huge numbers (more than 336) of infantry weapons kept in a safe remote zone. Once you are attacked you commission them and move them to the areas they are needed most. This makes them very hard to find and keeps them more or less out of harms way, though you may want to have more than one stockpile just to be safe. The down side to this is there is a delay time between when they are commissioned and when they can be put to active use. This may mean you are deploying them during the calm of a CF.

What I call a garrison dump is a small number of infantry weapons (112 at most) kept in your cities and in empty zones a short distance away from cities (4-6 zones). When you are attacked you commission them up and have defenses spring up in your cities from nowhere. Even better, an enemy can pass very close to the zone and not see defenders until you commission up the units, at which time you can immediately attack (which may be a nasty surprise). This is especially effective because most low level attackers, as noted, only attack zones in a narrow corridor to a city. In addition they are unlikely to engage any more zones than necessary unless they see active defenders are in that zone (which of course uncommissioned inf are not). On the down side, these zones may be lost just due to bad luck or a particularly meticulous attacker, which is why you should limit the number of weapons in them.

Whatever happens, once you get infantry into the battle you need to be particular about how you use them. If against an active player, probably the best use for the infantry is to send a large group of them against his force to delay him and expend ammunition. If he ABR’s the infantry than so be it, clean up whatever happens to live through the attack with actual units. Meanwhile other units should retake undefended zones you have lost to the enemy. Because most low level attackers favor using a few powerful units, this is usually an extremely effective tactic because you can bog them down in hopelessly long delaying battles forcing them to chose between spending half an hour killing a company of infantry, using up their ammo and becoming vulnerable, or going to ABR and taking the damage it will cause.

Against inactive players use the infantry to retake empty zones and if you find an enemy force attack it with a company or more of infantry. Leave the infantry battle to go to ABR, but from time to time check on the battle from the War Room → Battles page to make sure that the battle idle time keeps increasing. Around 30 minutes idle the battle should go to ABR, and will likely either cause heavy damage to defenders or crush the opposition depending on how many units went in at once. If the battle idle time resets to 0 than someone entered it at some point. If the battle idle time goes to 0 and stays there, someone is piloting against your inf.

A word of caution when attacking enemy forces with infantry. Always attack with at least a company if you can. A single infantry unit is basically useless for any more than taking empty zones. The reason that infantry do so well on ABR is that there is always a 10% chance that any unit will engage at range 0, and infantry gain a bonus to hit at range 0. As a result the more infantry you have in the ABR, the more damage you will do (with a full 36 inf units in an ABR, you will have on average 3-4 infantry at range 0 each time they fire). Even against active pilots that will kill them, infantry are more effective in large numbers. A single infantry unit can only absorb so much enemy fire before it dies, so you need a fair number of them to effectively deplete enemy munitions.

In order to get over the fact that infantry are slow you need to plan. Ideally they will be in position before you need them, so place them so that they are in the path of enemy advance and/or are only a single zone from their own intended attack targets. This lets them move into position with a minimum of fuss, and be ready to counter enemy forces when things get started. Also keep in mind that infantry attacking a zone move instantly into that zone, so an infantry unit can move more quickly by attacking enemy undefended zones than it can by moving through friendly zones. If possible take advantage of this!

Once the war is over remember to decommission your infantry. They are expensive to keep around. If any of your infantry commanders skilled up, store him for later use. Even an increase from 8 to 7 drastically improves their effectiveness on ABR.